“Since the original unveiling of the iPad, the company has outlined next to nothing about the actual specifications of the A4 SoC other than its 1GHz clock speed,” Prince McLean reports for AppleInsider. “‘We have a chip called A4,’ Steve Jobs said on stage at the iPad event, ‘which is our most advanced chip we’ve ever done that powers the iPad. It’s got the processor, the graphics, the I/O, the memory controller — everything in this one chip, and it screams.'”
“All that was publicly known about the A4 was built upon reports like those published on AppleInsider’s, which highlighted a network of evidence documenting the company’s efforts to design its own custom processors based on the ARM architecture and incorporating graphics and video cores from Imagination,” McLean reports.
“That same year, Apple had acquired PA Semi, a fabless chip design firm which had been working on advanced, specialized PowerPC processors,” McLean reports. “Immediately afterward, Jobs told The New York Times, ‘PA Semi is going to do SoCs for iPhones and iPods.'”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]
Does it have altivec???
Looks like it is machined (CNC) from a solid piece of aluminum, like the MacBook Pro?
After reading the article, I still know nothing about the A4.
Way to regurgitate absolutely nothing.
Can I have my 30 seconds back?
My dad flew A4’s back in ‘nam. Now he’s flying with AAPL stock thanks in part to the A4. He should have bought five times as much. I told’em.
@ Nerd Beautiful
A-4 Skyhawk. My favorite Blue Angels plane.
http://a4skyhawk.org/6e1/html/a4-blues-boeing.htm
Maybe Apple should code name future iPads with names of great planes, because they will be flying high, doing fancy tricks, and living in the “cloud.”
Great idea, lets see, Spitfire, Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, Fury, Hornet, Demon, Mosquito………
@planespotter
Do I detect a Brit with memories of WWII war planes? I was stationed (after the war) at RAF Scampton – home of 617 Squadron, the famous dambusters.
“Great idea, lets see, Spitfire, Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest, Fury, Hornet, Demon, Mosquito………
Lancaster ..Wellington…Sopwith Camel. You’re too hilarious – also a Limey like myself. My squadron in the Fleet Air Arm, flew Barracudas, which were swopped out for a US Grumman plane that had ashtrays, to our amazement.
Grumman Avenger was the name.
@Nerd Beautiful
I was in Danang in 68 and 69. Please tell your father “Welcome Home” from me. Thanks.
@planespotter
Hopefully not the Comet!
@ron
Off topic as far as the A4 chip goes, but what the hell: the Grumman Martlet seems to sound more familiar to me than the Avenger, and I believe the Royal Navy had both for a while. Am I correct? Being just a punk kid of eleven that war was quite remote as I lived in Oxford which Adolph hinted he wanted for himself so it was never seriously threatened. My scariest moment came when a Dornier bomber brushed the trees around our house – the iron cross on its wings visible for a split second. Moments later it crashed into Shotover Hill. How appropriate!
“… a US Grumman plane that had ashtrays …”
What, no cup holders?
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gadfly, I lived on Howard St. halfway between Iffley Rd & Cowley Rd. In the slums, tho’ we didn’t know it at the time. Went bluebell picking on Shotover Hill. Are you getting your iPad tomorrow? With the A4 in? Just to keep with the subject!
http://www.ronnorrisart.com/
Don’t leave out the Mustang (my favorite). Of course it wouldn’t be a Mustang without that wonderful British Merlin engine!
Maybe A4 stands for Apple processor, 4 cores? (Two CPU cores and two GPU cores?)
Should we see an A2 on the iPhone?
@ron
You lived in Howard St. halfway between Iffley Rd & Cowley Rd. … It’s a small world as they say, as my father probably sold the house – to or on behalf of your father … I kid you not! he based his estate agency in East Oxford (on the corner of Cowley and Southfield roads) as it had a lot of transient buyers and renters due to the college students.
As kids we used to sledge down Shotover hill in winter, on tea trays, however, in spring we picked our bluebells over at Wytham Woods.
Slums in Oxford
Anyway –
You should read “Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey” by James Attlee
Maybe it could be your first book to buy for the iPad.
“A gem. . . . James Attlee”s scholarly, reflective and sympathetic journey up the Cowley Road is one of the best travel books that has been written about Britain”s oldest university city. It is not-at least not directly-the Oxford of punts and gowns. His raw material is diversity: the Cowley Road as a corner of the outside world, where change and excitement are squeezed into the cramped hinterland of the scholarly theme park of the city centre. . . . .The result blends a vivid account of daily life, fluid and unsettling, in a modern British town with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and present, time and space, and high culture and the hard scrabble world that sustains it. Oxford may be the city of lost causes, and this book is indeed ambitious; it could easily sound sententious or twee. But it works, gloriously.” – (Economist )
“The subtitle [of Isolarion] promises ”a different Oxford journey,” one confining itself to the Cowley Road in east Oxford. The attraction, for Attlee, is that the Cowley Road ”is both unique and nothing special”; the resulting book is unique and very special. . . . Residents of East Oxford can be proud to have this eccentric advocated and eloquent explorer in their midst.” – (Geoff Dyer Guardian )
Apologies for posting a review from a left wing rag, I’m sure you will get over it.
James Attlee, Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (University of Chicago Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0-226-03093-7.
This is not a rant, or an insult, I am just curious. I have been an avid reader of MDN for a while now. Is it me or are there a large number of Brits who read and comment on MDN?
@iPhoneEnvy
When you’re right, you’re right.
And you are right.
Another Brit.
@ iPhoneEnvy,
Yes, and it appears a good number of Australians also. It makes this site all the better for it. I do feel sorry for them having to put up with all of the idiotic political ranting and raving that we spew out. I guess for them it’s like having a whacked out, mentally unstable cousin that’s a big embarrassment to the family.